I Dream of Garlic

I’m not sure why, but I adore growing alliums. Garlic, onions, and leeks in the garden make me inordinately happy. Perhaps it’s their clean, straightforward form– long, strappy leaves going purposefully on their way from base to tip. Perhaps it’s the fact that, for me at least, they are easygoing, problem-free plants that slugs and snails (the bane of my existence) never touch.

Or it could all trace back to one pivotal life experience that captures my imagination to this day. I was traveling in Italy with a friend, splitting our time between art galleries in big cities and working on farms in the country. We worked on one farm in the Dolomites that we both remember so strongly. It was just exactly what you picture when you think “farm in the Italian countryside” and fulfilled every romantic notion we might have had. In particular, I have never shaken the image of the year’s onion harvest spread out to dry on the bricks in the large courtyard, under the shade of the enormous mulberry tree. Once dry, we helped to braid the onions into bunches, and then hung them from the rafters of an ancient stone storehouse, along with dozens of braids of garlic, all these alliums hanging like stalactites above such impossibilities as a wooden olive oil press, rounds of curing homemade sheep’s milk cheese and a year’s worth of homegrown wine.

True story.

I wonder if the rest of my life since has been just one long grasp at that perfect dream. At any rate whenever I harvest any number of garlic or onions, no matter how small, I always braid them and hang them in my kitchen. And every time I reach up to twist one off for dinner I feel a tiny thrill of homegrown pleasure.